From the Fire III (3 page)

God!
She
cursed herself again.
Soph, you’re pathetic. If you were a soldier and had
wakened to battle, you would have died three minutes ago.

“Faster. Come on!”

More wild gunfire.

Whoever was firing, and at what, they
didn’t seem to be hitting anything. Sophie could hear the sound of bullets
pinging and ricocheting wildly off metal and off stone. What was going on? Were
the survivors out there again, only to be fighting amongst themselves?

Something out there at last hit home. One
shock-pulse of quick, frantic gulping screams came through the vault door, a wraithlike
sound, wailing and decaying as if from very far away. Then another, the
girl
was screaming, the one who had hammered on the door with the piece of metal,
and her terrified cries were melting like falling ice, away, rising, turning
into liquid with the distance.

Learn it now. Do this now. Faster.
No more weakness,
Sophie thought,
no more fear or frailty. No
fucking
more.
I’m going out there.

And if by some dark and luckless miracle
Pete was still alive, she was going to save him.

She suited up as quickly as she could. She
had only worn the hazmat suit once before, when she and Tom and Mitch had
celebrated Mitch’s retirement from working with Kaiser-Hill. That had been
years ago. But the steps to the process seemed rote to her, almost reassuring even
with their methodical simplicity. A fluorescent duplex sheet taped inside the
weapons safe showed her all that needed to be done.

~

“Chest zipper FIRST, overlay Velcro LAST.

Seals already calibrated, DO NOT adjust.

Breathe through NOSE, NOT mouth,

Until neck joint LED
(left shoulder)
turns GREEN.

Join WHITE and BLUE tabs over LEFT wrist,

THEN right AFTER, repeat …”

~

She pulled the accordion-necked transparent
visor up from her throat, then ensconced her head in its claustrophobic casing.
She clicked the cycler button at her right wrist, and the battery-powered re-breather
began to push currents of saline and chilly air throughout the suit. Her shins
tingled, the hairs on her forearms rose and brushed against the suit’s inner
lining. A tiny, hyper-technical digital display was flipping wild screens of
information past her left eye, much too fast to read.
Like booting up some
damn supercomputer. God, what am I
doing?

She shuffled from boot foot to boot foot,
wondering how long she still had. How long
Pete
had, until she could
come to save him.

No bullets, now. No screams.

“Too slow.”

It no longer mattered to her. Saving
Pete was becoming secondary to finding an outlet for all her sorrow, all her
rage. If Pete was dead, Sophie would find her own cold and remorseless comfort
in threatening his murderers with death.

I need to learn, for my
Lacie. I need to learn how to kill.

But for two or three minutes, ever since
the last whirl of gunfire and the girl’s fading and then gurgling screams, the
outside had remained silent.

When the soft vinyl of the suit visor
began to mist over with Sophie’s breath, when the neck-joint LED shunted from
red to green, she at last lifted the HK submachine gun from its rest. She was
struggling to remember the gun preparation sequence. From all her years, from college
to Poli-Sci, iterative and systematic articles had always been second-nature to
her,
Gun or no, you should be faster at this
, her memory always cataloging
thousands of steps throughout her life
.
But like a fool, she had glossed
over Tom’s binder article on because it had seemed distasteful, a vicious and
meaningless little thing in a world that was occupied by only a single soul.

But now, she was not alone. She never
would be, she never would sleep easily ever again.

She found the ammunition clip’s release,
slipped the clip casing out partway and saw the stark, fluorescent-gilded
bullets arrayed there in a grim crescent all inside their transparent sheaths. She
shoved the clip back in, too hard, and cringed as she almost fumbled the weapon
out of her suit’s white-mitted hands.

Trying to slip her finger into the
trigger’s loop, she found that it was impossible. The suit was mitted, with her
fingers were spread in pairs within cushioned slots, with only the opposable
thumb in isolation. The three-clawed design was intended for maximum-safety
hazmat cleanup, not for fighting. Looking back to the bottom of the duplex
sheet, Sophie read what she had to do.

She pulled the hidden plastic zipper tabs
at each wrist, and the heavy mitts each unfolded like weighty and pale flowers,
enslaved by gravity. Beneath the mitts were thick Nomex-fabric fireproofed
gloves, four-fingered.

Yes.
The
gloves would certainly be thin enough to allow her to use the gun. She slipped
her right index finger onto the trigger.

Okay.
She
took a deep swallow.
If he’s alive alone, you drag him in. If anyone else is
out there, you kill them.

“No mercy,” she was saying. “You
can’t
.
You’ve got to kill them, they tortured Pete, they threatened to kill you. You’ve
got
to.”

She would need to figure out the gun’s
safety along the way.

* * * * *

Float-walking out of the Sanctuary,
struggling awkwardly through the corridor’s vinyl door seal, Sophie checked the
submachine gun’s safety for what seemed like the twentieth time. But as she
began to calm down, to steel herself for the kill, the weapon began to make
sense to her. The safety was actually part of the weapon’s fire selector, and
it was currently on lock.
Safe. It won’t fire.
That needed to change,
and soon.

She braced the gun barrel against her
right hip — she was doing this wrong, surely, and she’d probably bruise or
break her hip if forced to fire on split-second notice — and she crossed the Great
Room, trembling as the adrenaline once more burned its way into her bloodstream.

Do this. Do this now.

The adrenaline surge tingled, a
poisonous thrill. It coursed like misted fire inside her veins. Her heartbeat
thudded. Her breath flitted against the visor’s faceplate, pulses of mist
whisked away by the inner re-breather’s icy air and back again.

As she crossed over the Great Room to
the entryway, she pushed through the lead-lined plastic curtains and made her
way toward the radiation trap. Time was moving very quickly, then. She could
not even remember how she had pushed her way through the door seal with the
loaded gun.

Once she was free of the dangling lead-lined
strips, one curtain flap still trailing its tip over her left shoulder, she
clicked the safety off at last.

Good, good girl. Now call to
Pete,
her father’s voice was saying.
He answers, you go. You kill. You
understand me?

“Daddy. What if I
can’t
, what if I
...”

Enough. You do this for
Patrice, who never got the chance. You do this for me. Sheriff Henniger out
there, he earned this from you. You be brave, it’s all you now. Shout out
twice. He don’t answer, you stay. Any answer, his or theirs, you go out there
and be ready to fight. Do you hear me?

“Okay. Okay.”

It is time,
the
voice insisted. The other voice, the reedy teenager’s whisper. Terrified and
angry. Oh, the hate.

“Patrice?”

They need to learn,
Patrice sang.
Anything, Sophie. Anything is what you will do to live, to
kill and to be strong enough, to go to your beloved daughter.

III-2

THE BLOOD VIGIL AND THE
RHYTHM OF NOTHING

Slow pulses of time became waterfalls of
rush and Now, this moment only, cascading into life. Time
accelerated
. It
was almost a relief, to be free of that quicksand, the nightmare-lethargic
slowness of numbing fear.

Sophie walked through the last of the
tunnel and out to the entry before the vault door itself, its titanium
girder-bracings forming triangles of glinting metal to either side of her,
casting faint silver rainbows up across the faceplate of her suit. She leaned
against the left-side bracing, pushed her visor up against the door and yelled
through the vault door’s seam.

“Leave him alone! Leave him alone or
I’ll kill you!”

Her voice coruscated with purpose, panic,
rage. The suit’s filters muffled it, but they also turned her voice into
something spectral, something dreadful to hear. Her yelling echoed in a
slithering out beyond her.

Oh, yes. Delicious vengeance,
Sophia mine. Kill them. Kill!

Patrice, enthroned in Sophie’s
imagination with ankles crossed and clenching fingernails dug into her knees,
leaned forward to taste Sophie’s unleashed hatred, to revel in the birth of a
kindred and newborn Fury, cackling.

The laughter in her brain, Sophie could
not stand it. To silence it, she yelled again. “Pete!” Again. “Pete, can you
hear me?”

Still nothing. What in the Hell was she
going to do?

He was almost certainly dead. Sophie bit
her lip, breathing through her nose. She fought back tears, she forced herself
not to shift the gun to one hand and pound on the door in blind frustration.

“Pete!”

I was too slow, I wasn’t
ready. Wasn’t ready for any of this. All my fault. All my fault …

And yet, a savage yet somehow quiescent
aspect of Sophie’s psyche was insisting that not only was it not her fault that
Peter Henniger had died, it was an inevitability. The other survivors in their
malice and depravity had taken his police car and tortured him, forcing him to
disclose the shelter’s location. And the leader of the group had been
threatening to kill Pete if Sophie refused to open the vault door and then to
stand there, completely at their mercy.

If she had complied before Pete himself had
been killed, unarmed as she had been, she would surely have been imprisoned or
beaten or raped or even worse. And in the end, how likely would Pete himself
have been to survive such people if the shelter had been unoccupied, if she had
not been there?

They would have killed him, regardless
of circumstance. They would have eventually broken their way into the shelter,
or died in the trying. And finding how claustrophobic and confining the shelter
was, what was there to stop the intruders from turning on their own kind,
slaying amongst themselves until they were sliced and gunned down to a core
population of bloodthirsty alphas served by their dying slaves?

The truth in all of this was cutthroat,
inexorable and unrelenting. This persistent web of reason — filaments spun of
guesswork, laced tight with logic in an ever-stronger mesh of understanding —
caused Sophie to breathe more easily.

Not your fault, no. He never
had a chance.

In that silence, listening to the easing
of her own breath and staring at her oblique and fluid reflections dancing
against the fluorescent-banded door, Sophie noticed one strange thing … a thing
which she had never detected when she had first rushed through the tunnel and
into the shelter. There was a crystal-covered video screen, right there, hidden
below the vault door’s metallic transom.

Of course.
Tom
would have set a camera somewhere into the curved wall of the ladder-shaft. Its
lens might even have been disguised as one of the glo-lites between the ladder
rungs. What could the camera eye see that Sophie herself could not? If it was
still operational, she could hold vigil over the shaft and at least see if
there were any survivors.
Or bodies.
She might even be able to determine
if Pete was still alive out there without breaching the shelter’s seal.

She slid the sapphire-acrylic panel open
and watched. The digital screen was tufted with erratic lines of rasterized
gray pixels, waving in undulating sine curves across the view. Powdery tendrils
of static flourished and puffed across the image, then died away again. It took
Sophie several seconds to decipher what she was seeing.

The black-and-white view was not sourced
from the ladder, but somewhere much lower. The camera seemed to be positioned
perhaps three feet above the grated floor, which meant that it was somehow
disguised to look like something else. Was it part of the door itself? No. It
was somewhere in the shaft at an acute angle to the vault entry. Sophie stroked
the panel, looking for pan/tilt/zoom controls, but there was nothing of the
kind. The display was inert. But what the view revealed to her, after the
static had died away, was clear enough.

She could see starry constellations of
pulverized concrete, where bullets had impacted in the walls. She could see a
shattered glo-lite, a ladder rung scuffed to a brighter silver by a ricochet. Below
this, she discerned the black-and-white hazy negative of a man’s boot, a pool
of blood dripping down the drain, and a sheriff’s cowboy hat lying open end up
by a pallid and unmoving hand. She could not see his face or his body, but she
did not need to. She knew.

There were no other bodies. Peter
Henniger was dead.

“Oh, Pete.” She closed her eyes.

And somehow, she accepted this. She had
already known, but her cowardice and her responsibility for his death had
conspired to refuse her the comprehension of the reality. Only in seeing his
dead body there was she finally compelled into an understanding. Her grief was
there in a sudden wash of black and vacuous guilt, but it was not nearly the
tormenting shame which she had borne earlier, fleeing across the Great Room.

Pete was gone, but he was at peace and
bereft of a world that would likely never know true peace again for as long as
the remnants of shattered humanity endured.

Lost.
And
it was better this way.

“I’m sorry.” She ran her fingertips over
the vid screen, outlining his frozen hand. “I’m sorry you had to suffer.”

She looked at the display of the ladder
again, searching for shadows. Now, she was not dreading that Pete’s killers
were out there at all. She
wanted
them to be. She wanted to make them
pay. She stood there on vigil, staring at the screen, willing the huge man or
the younger intruder to appear again.

But what if it would be the girl
instead? She had been screaming, perhaps dying. What had they done to her? Would
Sophie be able to will herself to open the door and kill that girl, who may or
may not have had anything to do with Peter’s suffering?

No.

Still, she waited. The silver-static
minutes clicked away, the incalculable crescent-beginnings of an hour waxing
full.

She knew then the angry buzz of a dull
and meaningless descent and comedown, the anticlimactic thrill of
almost-battle, the soldier’s curse which no one ever talks about. Suiting up,
gearing up, locked and loaded and on edge, can’t breathe, terrified to die,
ready to kill, ready to fire and ... nothing. Nothing happens, nothing is out
there, not this time. And no one will ever care to hear that the great almost-fight
was merely one soul coming unto the threshold, ready to give her all and
finding that the world, without mockery, without artifice of fate, had chosen
to ignore her.

Only the fear would still remain.

So tired.

The adrenaline shock forced by the
survivors in approaching, by their attack upon the door, their murder and their
flight, had left Sophie’s nerves in a tattered fray. How long had she been
going now? Time was still impossible to restrict into any significance of
rhythm or calculation. It had no intricacy, only a coruscation. It was an almost-visible
and never-ending song composed of whispered screams, all resonating endlessly
without the need for breath.

And on. And on.

Her eyes began to close. She clicked the
submachine gun’s safety back on. She could not keep going like this.

She needed to listen, to know when the
intruders would come back. It was highly doubtful that they would ever leave. There
had been an entire series of gunshots, and she doubted that the pooling blood
she could see spattered along the shaft’s floor was entirely Pete’s own. Had
some other of the survivors died above? Why were they not still fighting
amongst themselves? Perhaps there had been some kind of uneasy truce. She
wondered if there were three or five of them or fifty, far out of sight,
plundering the H4 the tugging down ventilation piping, conspiring toward
Sophie’s own destruction.

If anyone were too clever,
they could drown me down here.

Until she had reason to believe that she
was truly alone, Sophie needed to plan, to prepare, to defend. If she smelled poison
or carbon monoxide coming in through the ventilation, she would need to act
quickly. And she would need to remove her hazmat visor to able to detect any
poisoning at all.

Oh, paradox.
Knowing
that they were out there, she could not dare to sleep.

Sighing and cursing under her breath,
Sophie unzipped the hazmat suit’s helmet and filtration mask. She gasped in a
series of full breaths, and her head swam with a rapid flush of oxygen. She
almost fainted. She had been so intent upon preparing for battle that she had
scarcely been breathing at all. Flinching from the suit’s sudden oppressiveness
of touch, she wanted to strip out of its confines. Her gashed knee was a
pain-jolting, gluey mess. There were a dozen itches she could not scratch, and
spider-lines of sweat were trickling down from her armpits and down her flanks.
The worst feeling of all was the unrecognizable, sensuous amplification of her
own touch as she stripped off the gloves and touched her own fingertips
together. She touched her wedding ring and it felt like a wreath of glass. Her
senses were overblown, unsettling.

But it would be too dangerous to take
the suit off entirely so soon after the intruders had hidden themselves away.
You
can’t take the suit off, Sophie.

“Want to.”

You can’t.

And as she fought the onrush of
exhaustion and her adrenaline’s last edge ached back away into its secret coil,
the last words Sophie chided herself with were these:

“Stay awake. Please.”

* * * * *

Still in the entryway.

She woke shivering and drenched in her
own sweat, the suit and the clothing beneath it twisted around her arms and
legs in sheets of contorted discomfiture. She gasped, looked up at the vault
door she had been dreaming of. It was still sealed. The dead world was out
there, the nuclear holocaust had burned her entire existence away. And suddenly
the sleep, the faceless nightmare she had been suffering through seemed more
tempting and alluring than the real.

She closed her eyes again. But something
metal was sticking into her leg, and below the kneecap her leg was tingling in
a painful, blood-starved swathe of angry and distant feeling.

She stretched her right leg out,
grimacing, and looked down. None of the blood had leaked through the suit, at
least. But she had been sleeping propped against the concrete wall, with the HK
submachine gun’s barrel pressed against her right knee.

How in the Hell? You idiot.
Gingerly,
she lifted the gun, observed its fire control setting and set it aside.
Sophie,
you fool. If anything had happened to scare you, if you were sleepwalking like
you used to when Tom was first away, or after the pregnancy, when, when the
withdrawals were coming for you, you ...

She might have blown a hole in her leg. And
a gunshot, without doubt, would have been horribly and slowly fatal. If the
safety had been off and she had accidentally shot herself, her only choice then
would have been to overdose on Valium and morphine and anesthetic and to kill
herself.

Much better than to die of an infection,
in blood loss and in agony.

And why not, Sophie? Why not
right now?

“Enough.” Her voice croaked. She was
completely dehydrated. She stripped out of the suit, a painful and humiliating
exercise which caused her entire body to stink and ache. She pulled herself
upright, pulled off her salt-stiffened clothes and threw them into a pile by
the door. Limping back into the Great Room, she used a garment hook to pull
down a rubberized laundry basket. It bounced its way down, she steadied it and
kicked it upright. She filled it up with mothballed sweats and T-shirts, then
kicked it past the radiation trap and up against the vault door’s right-hand
bracing. If she was ever going to hold vigil again and play at sentry with a
submachine gun against her thigh, she was at least going to be somewhat
comfortable.